Despite the fact that Google took the nuclear option on underhand and
spammy link building techniques back in 2012, backlinks from external websites pointing to your site still have a major impact on your rankings.
Not exact matches
Ranking highly for your search terms can provide an immense amount of traffic to your site, and this means that SEO and
link building (once they were proven to work) became heavily involved in
spammy techniques that
built as many back
links as possible.
This is slightly off topic, but do you think there's a risk that competitors could use
spammy guest blogging
techniques as a negative
link building strategy to knock out their competitors?